Citizens take over the FCC: A conference (or at least a lunch)
: Here’s a conference I’d love to attend:
Citizens take over the FCC. All the constituencies who have problems with the FCC controlling what it shouldn’t control come together for a day and leave with a manifesto for change in the agency that oversees, regulates, and holds back the asset that belongs to all of us: spectrum.
Susan Crawford, David Isenberg, Om Malik, Kevin Werbach — and who else — know all about the technical and regulatory sides.
I’d take on censorship and free speech.
Susan Crawford put together a great conference on the FCC in New York a few weeks ago. It was way over my head, I’ll confess. It didn’t deal with the free speech issues. And its aim was different; it created dialogue with the FCC and that’s a good thing. David Isenberg has had some great gatherings that I unfortunately missed; they were, as I remember, more about freeing the network. Kevin Werbach has run big conferences in Supernova that explore various issues. So maybe I’m just late to the party.
But I see something that is, I think, simpler and, as a result, more radical:
Let’s look at what would happen if we abolished the FCC. What regulation, if anything, would we need instead? How are the FCC and Congress hurting development? We, the people, tell the FCC — and Congress — that spectrum is ours and we want to see it developed freely. We take control. We reset the starting point for the discussion.
: Well, fancy that: Just as I finished writing this post, I saw that Steve Verdon at Outside the Beltway also calls for abolishing the FCC (though he concentrates on free speech, not on the spectrum, network, and technology issues) . It’s a friggin groundswell. It’s a movement.
